The Buddha stands in abhaya mudra bestowing the gift of fearlessness. Why fearlessness? What fears?  All living beings suffer from a certain fear: fear of not finding enough food to survive, and fear of being turned into food for someone else. Even a great lion is afraid of going hungry; with all his power, he cannot command anyone to bring food to him.

We humans too suffer from myriad fears; for millennia, hunger and famine have staked our destiny. In the Book of Revelation in the Bible, there is a story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, each horseman personifying pestilence, war, famine and death. In 1964, a remarkable Czech film by Zbynek Brynych, probed the debilitating destruction of the hearts and minds of the Jews in a state of terror and fear in the Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia; it was named so tellingly ….and The Fifth Horseman is Fear.   
    
Fear indeed has an apocalyptic power; like a mighty river that is frozen in winter, fear can sap all energy, and make every thing inert and lifeless. But what fear? There is fear of failure. Fear of feeling embarrassed. Fear of being laughed at. Fear of loneliness and abandonment. Fear of ignorance. Fear of mediocrity. Fear of old age and disease. Fear of feeling unloved. Fear of poverty and hunger. Fear of rejection. Fear of being bullied. Fear of being excluded and left out. Fear of being found out. Fear of not being a man enough. Fear of being lost. Fear of being nobody. Fear of humiliation. Fear of one’s dreams going awry. Fear of unworthiness. Fear of being betrayed. Fear of betraying those who trust us. Fear of a life lived without any meaning, without purpose.

In some circles this panorama of fears has been called ‘existential angst’, as though life itself is a source of fear. How can one live one’s life in all its intensity and with all its full power without knowing what fears freeze the mighty river of one’s life? It is thus one yearns for the gift of fearlessness.

One can go all through one’s life carrying the burden of one fear or another, shrunk in one’s being, living in a ‘winter of discontent’, unfulfilled, entrapped in ifs and buts.

A few years ago, on a hot, sultry weekend, some 150 men and women had gathered in Toronto to learn about some of these shackles of fear, and how one might break them. I was among them. As hours rolled by, a frail and nervous woman stood up to share her story of fears with us. She was 53, and a grandmother. “I have never dared to share this before … I feel dirty and burdened. I was four when it happened…My grandfather abused me sexually…” she sobbed. “It went on for many years…he died over 20 years ago   .but I see him all the time …in every man, even in my son. Until now I have never spoken a word about it for fear of humiliation…I have never forgiven him. I have never forgiven myself for keeping silent…”

It was a hot day, but a cold, slimy pain seized many hearts, obscuring any sense of life’s warmth. For this woman, this dreadful memory and the fear of it being found out had inevitably travelled through the convoluted corridors of her mind for 50 years, and they would surely accompany her to her grave some 20, 30, 50 years later unless she learns to break their spell and their power.
 
A hundred years ago, with the rise of Freudian psychology, it began to be believed that such fears and phobias have their origins in early childhood, and in order to address them to get rid of them, with the assistance of a therapist, one travels back to those early years . In such secular therapy there has been no place for forgiveness, or for divine grace, or for last judgement, or for acceptance of human folly.

As well, there was a rejection of the long-held belief that the victim was in some ways responsible for the crime. The notion of samskara – ideas, beliefs and events a person encounters in this life – have been in the making over many lives and many births – seemed hollow and even self-serving for those who perpetrated such inanities. There are genes and memes – at the root of biological and cultural inheritance – but the prevailing belief is that any retribution or punishment or acknowledgement of any of our actions must be for tangible events here and now.

Fear is both real and unreal; it is quite often merely a state of mind: fear of flying, fear of strangers, fear of water. Fear comes from somewhere inside, from memory, from an unpleasant experience, from a thwarted hope. I was once attending a show in Disneyland with my 8 and 10 year old daughters, Ankita and Amrita. It was called ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Audience’. Wearing special goggles, we experienced the fear of menacing mice at our legs, vicious vipers lurking about us, and overgrown dogs ready to devour us. It was frightening and thrilling, and very real. All of us – children and adults – were screaming with fear and excitement, except for 8-year old Ankita. Once the show was over, and we had goose-pimples on our skin as witness to our experience of fear, I asked her, ‘How come you were not screaming?’ She said calmly: ‘Dad, it was quite simple. I took my goggles off.’

Today I reflect on it and wonder what goggles we must keep off our eyes in order to shut out deadening fear that seems so utterly real. With what hands – and eyes – do we receive the gift of fearlessness of which the Buddha spoke more then 2500 years ago, much before Sigmund Freud or Jean-pal Sartre? What therapist do we seek who can show us what is real and what is merely an illusion?

Dr. Sehdev Kumar is Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, now lectures at the University of Toronto on Bioethics and Science/Religion Dialogue. This piece is excerpted from his forthcoming book “My Mother and the Meaning of Life”.
sehdev.kumar@utoronto.ca

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